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Hugh.

CHAP. VI.

the Danelaw.

The The power which Æthelstan had threatened with destruction stood forward as the lead- Wessex and ing power in West-Frankland; and the greatness of Normandy gave encouragement and it may be direct aid to the struggle of the Danelaw against Eadward's son.

But if wider hopes of common action dawned on the northmen, they were foiled at this moment of triumph by the murder of the Norman duke for the wild vigour which had been turned into fighting power by William Longsword crumbled into anarchy as soon as his grasp was loosed; and his son Richard, a child of ten years old, was hardly seated in the ducal chair in 943 when strife broke out between the Normans who drew towards he religion and civilization of the land in which they nad settled, and those who still clung to the old worship and traditions of the north. Lewis, thankless for the aid which had saved him, swung back at once to his older purpose, and seized the opening which the strife gave him for carrying out those plans of conquest over the Normans which had been so fatally interrupted by his schemes on Lorraine. His success was complete, for marching upon Rouen under pretext of aiding the young duke against the pagan reaction, he became master of the whole of Normandy without a blow. The sudden turn of affairs in France may have told on the other side of the Channel; it was at any rate at this juncture, in 944, that Eadmund rallied to a new attack on the Danelaw; and it was while Normandy lay at the feet of Lewis that he succeeded in driving

MERCA

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937. 955.

Recovery

of the Danelav

CHAP. VI.

out Olaf, Sihtric's son, and in again reducing it Wessex and to submission.1

the Danelaw.

937955.

Cumbria

and

But the measures which followed its conquest showed that the young king possessed the political as well as the military ability of his house. What Strath-Clyde. most hindered the complete reduction of the Danelaw was the hostility to the English rule of the states north of it, the hostility of Bernicia, of Strath-Clyde, and above all of the Scots. The confederacy against Ethelstan had been brought together by the intrigues of the Scot-king, Constantine; and though Constantine in despair at his defeat left the throne for a monastery, the policy of his son Malcolm was much the same as his father's.* Eadmund was no sooner master of the Danelaw than he dealt with this difficulty in the north. The English blood of the Bernicians was probably drawing them at last to the English monarch, for after Brunanburh we hear nothing of their hostility. But Cumbria was far more important than Bernicia, for it was through Cumbrian territory that the Ostmen could strike most easily across Britain into the Danelaw. The Cumbria, however, with which Eadmund dealt was far from being the old Cumbrian kingdom from the Eden to the Ribble, the southern part of which remained attached to the Northumbrian kingdom, even in the hands of the Danes, while the northern part, now known as Westmoringa-land,

1 He drove out its two kings, Olaf, Sihtric's son, and Ragnald, son of Sihtric's brother, Guthferth. Eng. Chron. (Winch.), a.

2 Skene, "Celtic Scotland," i. 360-361.

the land of the men of the western moors, had been colonized by Norwegian settlers.1

Though a fragment of the Cumbrian kingdom which the sword of Ecgfrith had made 2 remained to the last in the hands of Northumbria, its bounds had been cut shorter and shorter. Under Eadberht the Northumbrian supremacy had reached as far as the district of Kyle in Ayrshire: and the capture of Alclwyd by his allies, the Picts, in 756, seemed to leave the rest of Strath-Clyde at his mercy. But from that moment the tide had turned; a great defeat shattered Eadberht's hopes; and in the anarchy which followed his reign district after district must have been torn from the weakened grasp of Northumbria, till the cessation of the line of her bishops at Whithern tells that her frontier had been pushed back almost to Carlisle. But even after the land that remained to her had been in English possession for nearly a century and a half, it was still no English land. Its great landowners were of English blood, and as the Church of Lindisfarne was richly endowed here, its priesthood was probably English too. But the conquered Cumbrians had been left by Ecgfrith on the soil, and in its local names we find few traces of any migration of the Engle over the moors from the east. There was little indeed to invite settlers save along

3

1 In 966, "Thored, Gunner's son, harried Westmoringa-land," Eng. Chron., a. 966.

2 Between 670-675. See "Making of England," p. 358. (A.S.G.) 3 Badulf, the last bishop of Whithern of the Anglo-Saxon succession whose name is preserved, was consecrated in 791. Sim. Durh. ad. ann. (A. S. G.)

Robertson, "Scotland under Early Kings," vol. ii. p. 434.

CHAP. VL Wessex and the Danelaw.

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the Western The land of

Moors.

the Danelaw.

937955.

CHAP. VI. the valleys of the Lune or the Ribble; elsewhere the Wessex and huge and almost unbroken stretch of woodland and moorland and marsh which covered our Lancashire must have been almost as wild and unpeopled as the dales scattered among the Western-Moors" where St. Hubert found a "desert" for his hermitage. Carlisle indeed had carried on an unbroken life from its Roman and Celtic days; but it is doubtful whether life had as yet returned to the "ceaster" on the Lune, our Lancaster; and it was not till the tenth century that Eadward could set up his fort amidst the ruins of Mancunium.

The

settlers.

The "parting," however, of Deira in 876 among Norwegian Halfdene's warriors drove English fugitives for refuge into the desert land. One such we see in a certain Ælfred, who "came, fearing the pirates, over the western hills, and sought pity from S. Cuthbert and bishop Cutheard, praying that they should give him some lands." But it was only to meet other assailants. Along the Irish Channel the boats of the Norwegian pirates were as thick as those of the Danish corsairs on the eastern coast; and the Isle of Man, which they had conquered and half colonized, served as a starting-point from which the marauders made. their way to the opposite shores. Their settlements reach as far northward as Dumfriesshire, and southward perhaps to the little group of northern villages which we find in the Cheshire peninsula of the Wirral. But it is in the Lake district and in the north of our Lancashire that they lie thickest.2 Ormside and

1 Sim. Durh. "Hist. S. Cuthb." (Twysden), p. 74.

2 "The Lake district seems to have been almost exclusively

CHAP. VI.

the Danelaw..

937955.

Ambleside, Kettleside and Silverside, recall the "side" or settle of Orm and Hamel, of Ketyl and Wessex and Soelvar, as Ulverston and Ennerdale tell of Olafr and Einar. Buthar survives in Buttermere, Geit in Gatesgarth, and Skögul in Skeggles Water. The Wikings Sölvar and Böll and Skall may be resting beneath their "haugr" or tomb-mound at Silver How, Bull How, and Scale How.

2

While this outlier of northern life was being planted about the lakes, the Britons of Strath-Clyde were busy pushing their conquests to the south; in Eadmund's day indeed we find their border carried as far as the Derwent; but whether from the large space of Cumbrian ground they had won or no, the name of Strath-Clyde from this time disappears, and is replaced by the name of Cumbria. Whether as Strath-Clyde or Cumbria, its rulers had been among the opponents of the West-Saxon advance; they were among the confederates against Eadward as they were among the confederates against Ethelstan; and it was no doubt in return for a like junction in the hostilities against himself that Eadmund in 945 "harried.

3

peopled by Celts and Norwegians. The Norwegian suffixes, gill, garth, haugh, thwaite, foss, and fell, are abundant; while the Danish forms, thorpe and toft, are almost unknown; and the Anglo-Saxon test-words, ham, ford, worth, and ton, are comparatively rare." Taylor, "Words and Places," p. 115.

1 Ibid. p. 116. For the Norwegian settlements in the lakes, see Ferguson's "Northmen in Cumberland and Westmoreland." 2 Skene, "Celtic Scotland," i. 362.

3 Westmoringa-land survives, little changed in area, in our Westmoreland; our Cumberland is the fragment of the StrathClyde or Cumbrian kingdom which remained to England after the rest had gone to the Scottish kings.

Cumbria

given to Malcolm.

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